Policy guidance and pitfalls aligning IPCC scenarios to national land emissions inventories

Gidden, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0687-414X, Gasser, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4882-2647, Grassi, G., Forsell, N., Janssens, I., Lamb, W., Minx, J., Nicholls, Z. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4767-2723, Steinhauser, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5989-6855, & Riahi, K. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7193-3498 (2022). Policy guidance and pitfalls aligning IPCC scenarios to national land emissions inventories. Earth and Space Science Open Archive 10.1002/essoar.10512676.2.

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Abstract

Taking stock of global progress towards achieving the Paris Agreement requires measuring aggregate national action against modelled mitigation pathways. Because of differences in how land-based carbon removals are defined, scientific sources report higher global carbon emissions than national emissions inventories, a gap which will evolve in the future. We establish a first estimate aligning IPCC-assessed pathways with inventories using a climate model to explicitly include indirect carbon removal dynamics on land area reported as managed for by countries. After alignment, we find that key global mitigation benchmarks can appear more ambitious when considering this extra land sink, though changes vary amongst world regions and temperature outcomes. Our results highlight the need to enhance communication between scientific and policy communities to enable more robust alignment in the future.

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